Nonlinear Delayed Differential Optical Phase Feedback For High Performance Chaos Communications

International audienceWe report on the latest development in electro-optic chaos communications intended for physical layer optical data protection. The nonlinear delayed feedback scheme makes use of the optical phase as the dynamical variable exhibiting a high complexity broadband chaos. The proposed setup was found to be a superior alternative approach to the most popular way in Optics to generate chaos, the feedback laser dynamics. We report unprecedented performances in terms of bit rate and transmission quality (up to 10Gb/s, with nearly error free transmission over more than 100 km, without digital error correction), both in laboratory and field experiments